By last Friday, 200,000 people had signed up online to request a ticket to Trump’s grand opening in Tulsa on Saturday, June 20, the first in a series of reelection campaign rallies. Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale, tweeted: “Trump MAGA Rally in Tulsa is hottest ticket ever! Over 200k tickets already & it’s not even political season.… Gonna be GREAT in the most open state in the nation!”
A day later he had to update his tweet: “Correction: now 300,000! Going to be epic!”
By Monday morning, the number had grown to almost a million. Tweeted President Trump: “Almost One Million people request[ing] tickets for the Saturday Night Rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma!”
Predictably, the Left lost it. The Huffington Post’s snarky response was predictable, calling the rally “an absurdist situation” as a million people couldn’t possibly fit into the Bank of Oklahoma (BOK) Center, which only holds 19,000 people.
The HuffPo writer, S.V. Date, couldn’t fathom why Trump would hold his kickoff rally in Oklahoma, a state which he won by 36 percentage points over his Democrat rival, Hillary Clinton, in 2016: “It is unclear why Trump’s campaign … is even holding a rally in Oklahoma, a deeply Republican state nearly completely surrounded by other Republican states.”
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If someone has to explain to that HuffPo writer why Trump would deliberately go to his base for the first of his rallies then all hope is lost that he will understand anything else about the Trump phenomenon.
The HuffPo writer, a senior White House correspondent for the left-liberal outlet, just couldn’t understand it. After all, he wrote, “It is unlikely that many or even most of those who signed up for tickets on the Trump campaign’s website have any intention of making their way to Tulsa — a city with a population of 406,000 in a state of only 4 million.”
MSN said that “concerns have been raised that the rally will trigger a spike in cases of COVID-19 in Oklahoma, the number of which is already trending upwards.” Dr. Bruce Dart, Tulsa’s health department head, said, “I wish we could postpone this,” while editors at Tulsa World opined that “a mass indoor gathering [isn’t] a good idea.”
Trump’s deputy communications director, Erin Perrine, said not to worry: “The campaign takes the health and safety of rally-goers seriously and is taking precautions [temperature checks and other measures] to make the rally safe.” Ronna McDaniel, the RNC’s National Committee chairwoman, said that after all, “people with underlying [health] conditions — they’re not going to go to a rally like this.”
David Axelrod, former president Obama’s campaign advisor, explained that the real reason behind the rally has to do with stroking President Trump’s ego: “It’s about aggrandizing the president’s fragile ego and need, in this vulnerable moment, to be bathed in the love and approval he desperately craves.”
The Left sees what’s about to happen in Tulsa and isn’t at all happy about it. Not only will the rally’s enthusiasm reflect the pent-up demand for such boisterous gatherings among the president’s fans, it will be a time of harvesting and reaping. In January, following one of the president’s last rallies before the COVID-19 outbreak, Parscale tweeted the results: 8,000 people attended the Wildwood, New Jersey, rally. But 158,000 tickets had been requested, and half of them had been identified: 10 percent had not voted in 2016, and a quarter of them were Democrats. The others were candidates for campaign solicitations.
That means that, following Saturday’s rally, the Trump campaign will have identified hundreds of thousands of people who then could be invited to support financially the president’s reelection efforts. They would also be invited to work, formally or informally, for the campaign by reaching out to family and friends as Election Day approaches. And special attention will be paid to turning those Democrats attending the Tulsa rally into supporters of the president in November.
It also means that, with the BOK Center sold out, crowds getting there early and lining up hours and even days ahead of time will make for great press, which will go national, despite the mainstream media’s unhappiness.
To top it all off, Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt couldn’t be happier about the upcoming rally on Saturday: “We are honored President Trump accepted our invitation to our great state. The President is making Oklahoma his first campaign stop sinice March 2, and his visit here confirms Oklahoma is the national example in responsibly and safely reopening. I am excited to welcome President Trump to Tulsa next week and for Oklahomans to show the world how we are a Top 10 State.”
An Ivy League graduate and former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American, writing primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at [email protected].
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